Possibly useful stuff

My child units have been asking me to install the Galacticraft Minecraft mod for many months. While we have lived in Minecraft for 3+ years, I had never installed any mods and had no idea how to. So I started reading.

The Galacticraft wiki and forums have a lot of info, but skip a few steps that are probably obvious to non-noobs. So here is a step-by-step guide to installing both Galacticraft server and client for Minecraft mod noobs like myself.

First the server. We run multiple worlds (listening on different ports) on an iMac running OS X 10.10. All worlds use Minecraft 1.8.7.

Start with a new world because an existing world will not have the necessary ores. Just make a new, empty directory.

Download the latest Forge.

Download Galacticraft for 1.7.10. 1.8.x fails to run because it cannot find the CPW package.

Run the Forge installer. Select server. This downloads Minecraft 1.7.10.

Make the mods directory and move all of the Galacticraft jars into it.

Modify the startup script to call the Forge jar instead of the Minecraft jar.

Edit server.properties. Change the MOTD. Optionally change gamemode to creative to make the game more playable for younger players.

On Saturday, I finally asked Amazon customer service to call me, which they did about 10 seconds after I clicked ok. Pretty amazing. Unfortunately, tier 1 and tier 2 customer support were clearly following a script and would not skip any steps. Paraphrasing…

After a few minutes of What does it do? What is on the screen? etc. the real diagnosis begins. Please hold power button for 40 seconds. I already tried that, many times, without success. Ok, but please try it now, I will tell you when to release. Ok. Did it work? No, still stuck on the screensaver. Please charge the Kindle for 15-30 minutes, I will wait for you. I have already gone through several full charge/discharge cycles. Please charge the Kindle. Ok. 20 minutes later. Please press the power button now. Did it work? No.

After over 30 minutes on the phone, tier 2 finally declared my Kindle dead and they would send out another one. But wait, we’re not done yet. To confirm your identity, please tell me the last four digits of the credit card you used to purchase the Kindle. Uh, I use several cards but I soon found the correct card. I need to mail a return mailing label to your wife’s email address [to whom the Kindle is registered]. What is her email address? Oy, she has a long email address, success after 5 attempts. Please verify you received it. Hold on, I need to find a machine I can use to read my wife’s email. Confirmed.

The new Kindle arrived on Monday, already registered to my wife’s account. Again, very impressive. Now I just need to return the dead one.

Wow, can this really be Amazon’s boilerplate response email? First, I said “my Kindle Voyage does not boot” along with the order number in my email but that became my “Kindle Fire’s volume” in their reply.

And then there is the rest of the message. Current phish from Nigeria has better grammar and style than this. I cannot believe Amazon has not provided their customer service representatives with better content.

The Voyage will not boot and only displays one of the built-in screensaver images

But the image is corrupted at the bottom, lines of non-refreshed pixels:

This is an odd way for such a simple device to die. I am guessing the images are stored in flash not ROM so maybe the memory is corrupted? If the display is broken, it should still boot but not refresh those rows. Going to ask Amazon for a warranty replacement.

Elgato silently removed support for their own Game Capture HD in the latest version of EyeTV, 3.6.8. This is not mentioned in their release notes so I found out the hard way after upgrading. Elgato, why did you remove support and remove it without warning!?

But they were nice enough to provide a KB article about this with a link to download 3.6.7. I hope they change their minds in 3.6.9 otherwise I will be stuck at 3.6.7.

CSI: Cyber is just blog fodder. There are so many things wrong in each episode that I do not have time to post them all. S01E05 – Crowd Sourced has a head-scratcher:

Uh, what? Where did they find that definition?

Merriam-Webster has the commonly-accepted (and to the best of my knowledge, the only) definition:

the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers

In the tradition of reverse-acronymization, I thought N.O.R.M.A.L. would be a great name for a very public, yet very sinister group, and thus was born the National Organization to Regulate the Mental Activity of Lemurs/Luddites/Libertarians/Lycans/Lomographers/LinuxUsers.

I have a visual in my head for a N.O.R.M.A.L. poster, but sadly I cannot draw, at all. So that image will forever live only in my head.